


One-Sided

by daylighthour



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon, Canon Continuation, Continuation, Deathfic, Future Camelot, Gen, Post 5X13, Post Series, Spoilers, sad!merlin, season 5, season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 05:11:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15856869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daylighthour/pseuds/daylighthour
Summary: Set after 5x13, so please do NOT read if you don't want literally everything spoiled for you.What does one do when destiny's path dries up and leaves no familiar path to follow? Merlin doesn't know. Camelot heals and things go back to a new normal, but Merlin can't do anything but stand on the edge and stare.





	One-Sided

Merlin stays at Avalon, standing with his toes bordering the water, for a long time after the smoke has faded. The water then is so clear and still, undisturbed by wind nor creature, and Merlin wishes he were the same. He sits, crouched, tucking his back against a rock, watching the sun dip over and lower in the sky until she has left him too. He will not go back to Camelot tonight.

  
There are no sounds of war to fill the air, no hiss of fire nor screech of sword, and Merlin realizes just how quiet the night is. An occasional cricket chirp or rustle of leaves is all that convinces Merlin he hasn’t been somehow sucked into a painting. He wouldn’t have scoffed at the possibility, not now after all that has happened.

  
Two rabbits scurry out from a bush, stopping for a moment to twitch their noses at Merlin before moving on. Unbidden, he feels a pang of jealousy and wonders if this is how it will be now. Feeling jealous at the thought of anything having a pair, a partner.

  
A friend.

  
The moon creeps up from the tops of the trees, and Merlin makes a nest of grasses and settles into it. There is no body beside him, no voice to nag him to get a fire going, and so he doesn’t. He hugs his shoulders against the night’s chill and shivers, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’d seen enough of fire that day to make him never want to see it again.

  
Sleep is falling into a well: dark, deep, and hollow. Merlin wakes with the dawn, mist rising from Avalon’s waters and glittering in the purple light. It’s too beautiful a sunrise for so dark a world.

  
He sits at the water’s edge for a while longer, watching the sun gather all the strength that he himself lacks. While he’s here he is the only one who knows that Arthur is dead, and so he can pretend that he’s out to collect firewood, and that when he comes back Arthur will be staring at him blearily from his bedroll. Such a fantasy is worth remaining by the lake for a few hours more. The whole time Merlin half-expects Arthur to come at him from the trees, clop him on the head, and tell him to keep moving. Nothing such happens.

  
When he can’t stand the silence any longer, Merlin stands to leave, and that's when he sees it. The footprints in the mud they had left behind, and like a lance to the heart, the place where two sets dwindle to one. He stares at that point where the two shaky paths converge, where Arthur had fallen. Merlin can’t stand to look at the footprints any longer so he magics them away. Instantly, he regrets it. Those footfalls were Arthur’s last upon the earth, and he had just erased them as a tide to sand. He wishes he could erase himself so easily.

  
The road back to the castle is long. As Merlin walks he looks to his side, expecting to see Arthur, then looks to his other side, then his front, then his back, panicking before he remembers. Sometimes he even calls out, before his voice shrivels like curdled milk in his throat. The panic is easier than the remembering.

  
What is a coin without it’s other side? Hollow and flat, as Merlin is. One half of the whole, feeling the absence keenly like a vortex in the stomach. He had failed his destiny. But worse than that, he had failed his friend.

  
***************

  
Merlin sees the table in Gaius’ quarters where they had lain Arthur, pale with the Questing Beast’s poison coursing through his veins. He sees the bench Arthur had flopped upon, feverish with an infected arrow wound. He sees the vials and bottles and bowls and potions that had once saved Arthur but would never do so again. Reminders of all the times Arthur had pulled through, against the odds.

  
Merlin avoids Gaius’ chambers after that.

  
***************

  
TIme passses. Soon the time for dressing in black is over, and the kingdom begins to come alive again, though it will never be so for Merlin, because what body can survive without the beating of its heart.

  
Guinevere marries Leon because he understands. Understands the need for a queen to have a king, understands what it takes to rule a kingdom, understands that she has loved once and will never love again. Their interactions are polite, civil, and when they have an heir to the throne of Camelot they can want nothing more of each other. The child has a mess of curly dark hair and brown eyes like her mother. In private moments Merlin imagines those eyes to be a piercing blue, when he thinks of what the future could have been. What it should have been.

  
Before Gaius passes away he introduces Merlin to a young lady he met in the lower town. She has red hair and a soft smile, and in another life Merlin might have loved her. But any capacity for love he has ever possessed lies now in ashes in the depths of Avalon, and so he merely weds her and stokes their little fire in their little home. For a while Merlin is close to happiness, and he thanks Gaius’ spirit for what was surely meant to be a distraction.

  
Then her belly begins to swell, and all the village women know from the way the baby sits in her womb that it is a boy. Cocooned in blankets one night, she asks Merlin for a name, and there’s only one name that he can possibly consider giving his son.

  
On a long blistering night when exhales are ice crystals, his wife screams and screams and then falls silent. Merlin tries to save the baby, but he comes out blue-faced and still, and it is the second Arthur that has died in his arms. The second whom he has failed.

  
It is then that he decides to leave Camelot, once and for all. He can no longer take it, wandering near the castle steps, seeing the knights train with no Arthur to train them. Merlin would give the world to quiver under armor and shield one last time, but no one again asks him to. He cannot bear to see Leon at Guinevere’s side, in the throne that his not his and never will be, to see the false smiles they exchange and the sorrow in their eyes when they think no one is looking.

  
And so Merlin gathers up what little he has and sets out to the forest, telling no one and leaving them to try to understand. The forest where, even after years ( _years_!) he can still hear Arthur’s voice telling him to stop being a girl, his laughter when Merlin fumbles ringing throughout the trees.

  
Eyes blurry, Merlin misses a scraggly root and trips. No one is there to taunt him for it, and that pain is far greater than his twisted ankle.

  
His feet carry him back to the only place he knows anymore, the only place that still matters. Avalon is just how he left it that day, the waters smooth, the mountains vast and immutable. He sits again at the water’s edge and takes up a vigil, resolving to wait until the day someone breaks through the lake’s surface to say of all the stupid things Merlin’s done in his life, the plan to wait for the once and future king to come again topped the list.

  
Years pass, and the world around the lake changes. Merlin doesn’t investigate as trees fall, buildings rise, and people come and go. He has all he needs to see in front of him, and so long as the lake is not disturbed nothing else matters. As he waits in Avalon, Merlin loses count of all the years that flick him by like gusts of wind, but he wouldn’t have spent the time any other way.


End file.
